CloudShare Blog

SharePoint On-Premise and Online Development with CloudShare and Visual Studio 11 Beta

By Danielle Arad - April 17, 2012

3 min read

I have spent my last few posts on the CloudShare blog focusing on how to develop specific SharePoint artifacts to both SharePoint Online and On-Premise using Visual Studio 11 Beta (Note: You can review prior articles by accessing my profile page).

In this article, I will give a brief summary of new SharePoint development features available in Visual Studio 11 Beta (VS 11 Beta). In future articles, I will show you in greater detail the rest of the goodies that come with the newest IDE version.

First, you need to access your CloudShare account and start one of your available environments.

Once your environment is ready, open VS 11 Beta. It’s completely gray with a little bit of METRO Style :). Create a new project by clicking on “File -> New Project”

In the “New Project” window, go to the SharePoint section under Visual C# project category. Here you can see the first changes as compared with Visual Studio 2010 (VS 2010) – there are fewer SharePoint 2010 Project Templates, which is very cool because unnecessary project templates have been removed. As you can see in the screen shot below, there are 5 templates (versus 12 project templates in VS 10) in VS 11 Beta for SharePoint 2010 development:

The following table summarizes available SharePoint project templates in both IDE versions and identifies which are equivalent:

Select the “SharePoint 2010 Project” template. Provide a name for the project and the solution and click “Ok”.

In the “SharePoint Customization Wizard” window specify your local SharePoint 2010 site for testing purposes, leave the deployment type as “Deploy as a sandboxed solution” and click “Finish”

As always, once the project creation process ends, you will see the complete project structure for your SharePoint solution in VS 11 Beta Solution Explorer. Select the name of the project, right click with your mouse and select “Add -> Add New Item…” As you can see in the “Add New Item…” window, there are a few more changes:

A few new SharePoint Project Items (SPI), like Silverlight Web Part and Site Column

Site Column SPI, You can create the initial XML definition of a SharePoint site column (Text type).

Content Type SPI, This is really cool because it allows you to configure a SharePoint content type by means of a visual designer where you can choose existing site columns or add new ones defined in your current project.

List SPI, allows you to create a list schema and a list instance with a new visual designer, similar to the new Content Type SPI. I will cover this new designer in future posts in more detail. For now, just enjoy a nice screen shot:

In addition to these new project and SPI templates, there are other improvements:

There is now a “Publish” option available in your “Build” options, which allows you to publish your solutions to the following locations: File System, Remote Server, and/or SharePoint Online.

You can use VS 11 Beta in your current CloudShare development environment for SharePoint 2010. This means you can develop SharePoint 2010 artifacts in VS 11 Beta since: